MLA Referencing: In-Text Citation Style Guide
MLA Style of Referencing:
In-Text Citation
The Modern Language Association (MLA) style of referencing
is used in many liberal arts and humanities departments around the world. It is
a style that emphasises the page number of the source, since it is often used
in conjunction with many direct quotes.
For in-text citations, the MLA style uses the format of only
placing the author’s surname and page number between brackets next to the
paraphrase or quote. For example, (Perry 35). Make sure that you don’t use any
punctuation for in-text citations in the MLA format.
If you already use the author’s surname in the body of your
work just before the paraphrase or quote, then you will only include the page
number in brackets: (35). If you use more
than one text from the same author, you can use a shortened title of the
text (with a comma before it) in the bracket to distinguish the various works,
for example: (Perry, “The Reckoning” 27) and (Perry, Times Gone By 35). Pay attention to the differences in format here:
short texts, like poems, short stories, titles of chapters or songs would be
placed in inverted commas in references, and longer texts, such as books,
anthologies, films or the titles of dissertations would be placed in italics.
In the examples from Perry, “The Reckoning” is the title of a poem, and Times Gone By is the title of a novel.
If you have two authors
with the same last name, you can include their initials in the in-text
citations: (K. Perry 35) and (R. Perry 166). For texts with up to three authors, you can place all of
their names in the brackets: (Harrison, Turner and Viveck 47). For texts with more than three authors, give the name
of the first author (the one listed first on the title), use the Latin
abbreviation “et al.” to show that some names are omitted. Make sure to include
the period after the abbreviation. For example: (Jameson et al. 33).
When quoting indirect
sources, in the case where the author you are quoting from is already
quoting from another text, include the abbreviation “qtd. in” in your
reference. For example: (qtd. in Liebermann 291).
For electronic
sources like websites where no page number is available, you can give the
author’s surname and a shortened title of the text, for example (Erickson, “The
Haunting”) would be the reference for a blog post by Thomas Erickson entitled “The
Haunting of Elizabeth Priest in David Eileen’s Wanderlust”. The titles of individual web pages and articles will
be in inverted commas, and the titles of the sites themselves will be in
italics, such as Forbes.com.
Films, songs or other electronic or non-print media will all
be referred to with surname and short title. For example, (Cameron, Avatar) will refer to James Cameron’s
film Avatar. You can also refer to
time ranges in your text if you refer to a specific moment in the film or
media, although this is not always necessary as long as you describe the theme.
The format of time-based references would be in hours, minutes and seconds: (Cameron,
Avatar 01:25:16 – 01:25:30).